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Kirk Varnedoe: Pictures of Nothing

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This book represents transcriptions of the six

Mellon Lectures that Kirk Varnedoe gave in the

spring of 2003, at the National Gallery of Art in

Washington, on the subject of abstract art in America

since the time of Jackson Pollock. Minimal but

immensely skillful editing has been done throughout

(by Judy Metro, the National Gallery’s editor in chief)

essentially to smooth off rough edges, eliminate

obvious repetitions, and connect loose ends of the

narrative. It is no advertisement, but a plain fact,

that this book therefore records what is, if nothing

else, an amazing extemporaneous performance,

made all the more amazing by the speaker’s ravaged

physical condition. (Varnedoe died of cancer a scant

three months after giving the last of these lectures.)

Working only with notes, though of course drawing

on a lifetime’s reservoir of looking and thinking, the

seemingly crafted and pregnant sentences present on

these pages really were improvised by the speaker in

the course of an hour’s talking.

It was not an irresponsible or offhand

improvisation—he knew more or less what he wanted

to say and had often rehearsed it, in his own mind and

at length with listeners. (And, of course, he worked

with an outline and a huge number of slides, which

played a mnemonic role.) But the words came ring-

ing out, every Sunday, fresh and unplanned, just as

the reader meets them here. Much was premeditated

but more was improvised: looking at the images

almost always inspired an unexpected thought,

instantly blended into the body of the argument,

and here preserved. He supposed these lectures to be

his last and intended them to be his most important

work, his testament of faith. He poured all of himself

into them.

Given that truth, it seemed better to take them

as they were than to try and guess at what Varnedoe

would have done had he been given the time to do

it. Perpetually dissatisfied with his own work, he

would have doubtless revised, rewritten, and recast

many sections; he had barely begun this work when

sickness overcame him. His inability to have under-

taken these revisions is, for his readers, both a good

and bad thing. A bad thing, obviously, because that

work would have enabled him to seal off his points

and drive home his arguments in the finished text

in a way that would have, among other things, made

this preface unnecessary. And his characterizations of

other critics’ and historians’ arguments and ways of

looking at these pictures, necessarily summary given

the constraints of time and the need not to lose his

listeners in academic pilpul, would certainly have

broadened and deepened.

And yet their unfinished nature is a good thing, or

at least not necessarily a bad one, because the work of

revision—shutting off exits, italicizing easily missed

prefAce

points, and giving academic heft to the whole—might

have diminished or even eliminated the extraordinary

urgency and sense of discovery, and even joy, that

still glimmers from these pages. Whatever might

have been gained in argumentative conclusiveness

might have been lost in improvisational electricity.

Varnedoe did not value too much “finish” in a work

of art, and the hot-off-the-press quality that he valued

in his favorite pictures—preferring rough and ready

cubist collage of the first lyric rapture to its later

synthetic refinements—is present here. The lectures

are, exactly in their non-finito form, more exciting,

and a better representation of the speaker’s mind

and heart, than the more deliberate book he might

finally have produced. Varnedoe’s unique quiddity as

a lecturer—his contagious excitement in the presence

even of reproductions of works of art, his skeptical

will to ask questions of received wisdoms, and then to

ask questions of the questions, and the sheer love of

painting and sculpture that exuded from him almost

as a physical aura—is present on these pages as it is

perhaps nowhere else in his published work.

Yet this unfinished nature brings challenges too,

to both editors and readers. This book as we have

it, with its central argument dispersed throughout

its pages rather than focused on a few of them, risks

being seen as a series of evocations and epiphanies,

rather than as a pointed single argument about the

nature of abstraction, and its meaning for American

experience and modern consciousness. Varnedoe

conceived each lecture as a kind of microhistory unto

itself, taking a small issue—the relationship between

Bauhaus utopianism and American minimalism,

or the parodies of abstract expressionism found in

American pop art—and turning it round and round

in the light of his mind, while deliberately evading,

as often as not, one single conclusive reading. The

lack of neat conclusiveness was part of the point—

art evades a single or even a double rule. He jokes at

the beginning of the third lecture that two listeners

came away with diametrically opposed ideas of what

he had been arguing for, because he had in fact been

arguing for both.

But though refusing to ride any pet theory to the

doom of art, he would never have wanted this work to

seem simply an “appreciation” or a series of fine point

considerations. The lectures were meant to be an

argument, and quite a tight, strong, and provocative

one; it would be a mistake to take the speaker’s allergy

to theoretical hobby horsing for a reluctance to enter

his horse into the race. That larger argument—though

always alive in suspension in these pages, and often

spelled out in summary parts—is never, perhaps, as

entirely summed up as he would have wanted it to be

in a final draft, and it might be useful to try and at

least sketch it out, however inadequately, here.

Varnedoe intended these lectures, as he explained,

to be a riposte or answer or reply to the Mellon Lec-

tures of Austrian-English art historian E. H. Gombrich

almost fifty years earlier, which produced Art and

Illusion—one of those rare books that deserves the

much abused adjective “seminal,” since almost

everything that has been made of the philosophy of

representation descends from it. In Art and Illusion,

Gombrich wanted to show that the history of

representational art since the Renaissance was not a

history of disciplined acts of copying-from-nature,

but one of heroic acts of invention, comparable to,

and inseparable from, the parallel growth of science

around them in the same historical time frame. For

Gombrich the rise of abstract painting, which was in

its heyday as he wrote, was a return of the irrational,

a romantic rebellion against that rational human-

istic tradition of representation—impressive in its

achievements at times, but essentially “primitivizing”

and limiting in its expressive range and vision of the

world. The abstract artist could say only one thing,

again and again.

Varnedoe wanted to show something like the

opposite: that abstract art was not an undifferenti-

ated wave of negations or calls away from order, but

a series of unique inventions—situated in history,

but responsive to individual agency, and immensely

varied in tone and meaning. He wanted to show that,

like the history of representation, the real history of

abstract painting shows the continuous evolution of

a new language for art that, through the slow growth

and accretion of symbolic meaning—so that a splash

might come to suggest freedom, and a scrawl the

Self—would capture truths about the world, and

about modern existence. This language might be

coded and “corrected,” changed, in ways very different

from the ways that the Renaissance language of art had

been changed and corrected, but it was in other ways

continuous with that language, or to its underlying

assumptions about the role of art, and susceptible to

the same kind of historical criticism and reasoning.

Abstract art might be mystical and romantic in many

of its achievements, but it was essentially liberal,

humane, and rational in its historical sequencing and

broader cultural existence—historical and rational

in the simple sense that each moment in its history,

far from being trapped in a narrow subjectivity,

drew like a motif in a symphony on what had gone

before and opened possibilities for what might come

next. This evolution depended, in turn, on stable but

open-minded institutions and audiences in order

to do this; a scrawl might suggest freedom because

a splash had before suggested the Self. The abstract

artist might seem to say one thing—reiteration was

part of his rhetorical arsenal—but abstract art could

say many things. The practice of artists and viewers

had for fifty years supplied an artistic language for

American art, expressive and world-encompassing,

that could register nearly any emotion or idea, from

rhapsodic lust to Zen asceticism. What the history of

abstraction gave us was not a series of cri de couers,

pots of paint flung in the face of the bourgeois, or

of Big Brother, but a set of responses to life in a self-

made language—sly and complicated and varied, and

in need of poetic parsing.

What had intervened between Gombrich and

Varnedoe to create this radical difference of view was,

of course, a developed and more complicated practice

of abstract art. But also, and just as important, there

had been a series of changes in art history, and these

lectures respond to both kinds of change. In fact,

this book represents the culmination of Varnedoe’s

lifelong attempt to reconcile the sensibility of an

unreconstructed aesthete with the consciousness of

an unapologetic postmodern historian. Varnedoe’s last

major lecture series before this one, his still unpublished

Slade Lectures at Oxford in 1992, had been entirely

devoted to untracking and unraveling the debates on

the idea of “postmodern theory” in art history, which

had so changed the field since his youth, let alone

Gombrich’s time. (He left them unpublished because,

ironically, those lectures seemed too heavily argumen-

tative and not sufficiently appreciative or art-loving.)

These Mellon Lectures are, in a sense, his response to

the crisis of postmodernism in art history that he had

identified in the Slade Lectures: an example of what he

thought art history could do without abandoning its

commitment to historical criticism, while still insisting

that when we talk about art as a thing unto itself, and

the presence of art as an experience irreducible to any

other, we are talking about something real.

For Varnedoe wasn’t, despite long years as a

curator at the Museum of Modern Art, a stranger to

the tumult in his discipline that had led to so many

fundamental alterations in the way that art history is

conceived. His original contributions to his field had

always belonged to that enterprise. His first impor-

tant lecture, presented in the late 1970s and repeated

many times, “The Ruins of the Tuileries, 1871–1883:

The Aesthetics of Shock and Memory” had been a set-

piece of social history, taking as its subject a seeming

nonsubject—the ruins of the ancient palace of the

Kings of France left in the middle of Paris after the

bloody suppression of the Commune in 1870. It was

very much a lecture about absences, things evaded

and not shown even in advanced painting: seeing this

black hole at the center of Paris at the making of the

impressionist moment helped us to understand that

moment far more fully, as a time of razor-edge uncer-

tainties, violence, destruction, and passionate politi-

cal quarrels, very different from the hazy bourgeois

paradise of conventional thought.

He never abandoned his commitment to this kind

of historical criticism. Varnedoe’s first question on

approaching a work of art was always to ask, Under

what circumstances was it made? Rather than, Who

made it? Or even, What feelings does it evoke in me?

(That question was crucial, but it came last.) But

he soon became uneasy with what seemed to him

too great or too easy a desire among his contempo-

raries to use social history to write away art history.

That project was not one that he could sympathize

with. The presence of the aesthetic—not as a narrow,

frightened repetition of a set series of OK forms but as

something viscerally thrilling, a frisson, an excitement

unlike any in the world—was at the heart of his work

and his life. He spent most of his career as a scholar

trying to define ways in which you could understand

art as history, without looking past the art only to the

history around it. “We have no satisfactory account of

modern art as a part of modern culture,” were the first

words of his Slade Lectures. The Mellon Lectures were

part of his project to help supply one.

His attempts to do this involved many kinds of

inquiry, lit by much reading, an intellectual journey

whose full and complex history will have to be saved

for another day. In order better to understand this

book, however, it might be helpful to see what had

preceded it. His search for a new model of history

brought him first, in his revisionist history of

modern art, A Fine Disregard, and in High and Low:

Modern Art and Popular Culture toward a kind of

Darwinian vision of art history. Greatly influenced

by the neo-Darwinian ideas of Stephen Jay Gould

and Ernst Mayer, of constant creative change through

the recycling of existing parts, these ideas seemed

to Varnedoe profoundly applicable to the story of

art. This neo-Darwinian emphasis on evolution as

a means of using the old to make the new and, still

more profoundly, on the idea of the individual varia-

tion as the only existing thing, illuminated his studies

in the nature of innovation: it helped him to under-

stand the cycle of perspective passing from Europe

to Japan to be remade by Hiroshige and Hokusai,

only to return to Europe crucially reimagined for

the advantage of impressionism; or the way that the

overhead viewpoint passes from art to photography

and back again, each time adapting to new meanings

through the inflection of familiar form.

This kind of history made for a thrillingly good

big-picture story, but in the 1990s Varnedoe began

to feel that it was inadequate to the specific pictures

themselves. Artists had agency, in ways that animals

didn’t. The big picture looked right, but as soon as you

got down to the small pictures, you were in a world of

a thousand conscious choices that had to be honored

on their own. He was therefore increasingly drawn, in

the 1990s, to the work of the neo-pragmatists and the

philosopher Richard Rorty. (A conversation with the

historian and critic Louis Menand, just as Menand

was finishing The Metaphysical Club, his history

of the origins of pragmatism in American history,

played a crucial role in deflecting Varnedoe from the

first subject he had considered for these lectures, the

history of portraiture, toward this knottier but, in the

end, more central one of abstraction: it was easy to

see the ground for looking at pictures of faces, but

why at pictures of nothing?) In Rorty and pragma-

tism he found philosophical reinforcement for his

belief that just going on was enough, that no founda-

tion, no ground was needed to make art from—art

made its own ground—and that all the choices were

ours: the artist to choose and make, ours to see and

discover. Irony was not limiting if it meant a sense

of proportion, an ability to bracket experience. This

kind of pragmatism led him back away from mega-

history, back toward biography and small stories. (He

sketched the barest outlines of a triple life of Johns,

Twombly, and Rauschenberg.)

This intellectual arc—from the excitement of dis-

covering ways for material and social history to shed

unexpected life on art, through the larger view of the

problem of creativity and change, into a final faith in

art itself, in lives and objects—was in many ways gen-

erational. One sees the same move from a new his-

toricism toward a revived attention to biography and

close reading of single forms and episodes in the work

of his friend Simon Schama and in that of the Shake-

spearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt: it is not forces

from outside bearing down on the artist that count,

but choices made within the picture from a palette of

possibilities. And, as much as the Tuileries lecture was

the masterpiece of his first “phase,” and the “Fine Dis-

regard” lectures of his second, a lecture Varnedoe gave

in 2000 on the Van Gogh portrait of Joseph Roulin,

which he had acquired for the MoMA, was the mas-

terpiece and keystone of his final phase of thought.

In that lecture he concerned himself with only one

image, this single portrait of a man in a uniform with

a beard, with each element in the picture squeezed

and poked until the last juice of meaning was pressed

from it. It was a lecture not about absences but about

presences, choices. Roulin’s beard, his uniform, the

background behind him, the wallpaper, the Socratic

nose, the Slavic eyes—every single thing that Van

Gogh had registered, every choice that he had made,

was assumed to be lit with the light of the time as it

had passed through the prism of his mind. Everything

depended on looking at what was there and how it

happened, and every look at the picture led you back

into the world in which it was made. This kind of

close looking demanded a lot of specialized knowl-

edge, about the artist and his times, and this meant, in

turn, that looking at pictures, and particularly look-

ing at modern pictures, had some of the qualities of

a learned game; but then, Varnedoe thought, learned

games have all of the quality of learned games, and no

one thinks our taste for chess or football aberrant or

fraudulent or imposed by a conspiracy of taste.

These last Mellon Lectures, the book before us,

represent an extension and final achievement that

flowed from that project. It is based on a fanatically

close and microscopically detailed study of a period,

yet is rooted in the simple-seeming belief that social

life already has an artistic structure. It is not simply

that culture has its politics, but that all social and

political life has its culture—that our social life is

inherently artistic, shaped by a set of rhetorical devices

and symbols and ways of speaking and showing

and seeing that exist already, and that artists articu-

late. Minimal art takes place within a broader social

dialogue about the uses of simplicity; this doesn’t put

it in its place, but it does place it. The artist is posi-

tioned among codes and conventions common to her

time—but she is positioned within them, and they

operate as perplexing and demanding choices rather

than as high-pressure systems, raining down whether

she has an umbrella or not. The artist is a permanent

Hercules at a perpetual crossroads, forever forced to

make choices in pairs of meaning that are not of his

own making. But he is a kind of Hercules, and it is he

or she who does the heavy lifting. In these lectures, in

this book, Varnedoe attempts to practice this kind of

history in the most resistant of contexts, taking this

matter of abstract art in America, which had none of

the easy crannies and nooks—the “hooks” of familiar

imagery and icons—that allow the climber to find his

way easily up the mountains of meanings. This was

sheer blank rock face, and to climb it required a deli-

cate touch and an unmechanical sensibility.

It could be objected that what Varnedoe set out

to achieve here—a map of choices within circum-

stances, gestures within social givens—is simply what

inspired traditional scholars have always done, and

that a cultural poetics is just another name for good

art criticism. And, in a funny way, what Varnedoe

ended up doing in these lectures resembles what

Kenneth Clark did in The Nude, another set of earlier

Mellon Lectures that Varnedoe keenly admired, as

much as it does what Gombrich did in his study of

representation: a study of seemingly set-piece forms

evolving radically different meanings through subtly

differing inflections and changing communities of

“readers.” Exactly so. (Or as Varnedoe would have

said, “That’s right! That’s right!”) Among his favorite

lines on art, or anything else, were those of Matisse in

his Notes of a Painter, pointing out that all the great

discoveries in art and life were simple, familiar truths

seen new. In a sense, that was and became the point of

these lectures—that abstract art was art, resistant to

any procrustean explanation, and requiring the same

patient work of re-creation, sympathetic summary,

interpretation, and historical reasoning, as any other

art had ever done.

To see the long chain of events of which one is mere-

ly another link, but to be acutely aware of that chain,

and to see all of the ways in which creative originality

involves forging a new link within it; to grasp the pres-

sure of the past neither as a limiting boundary nor

as a fixed inheritance; to re-create old value through

new arguments and use old arguments to make new

values—that was, for Varnedoe, exactly the project of

modern abstraction, and the place where art touches

life and reaffirms its connection to our experience.

His was, above all, an optimistic view of art and its

possibilities, one that saw hope, change, and even a

kind of progress where others saw only pessimism,

individual repression, and constant negation. In this

sense, the key argumentative passage in these lectures

occurs at the beginning, rather than the end of the

book, because it is meant to be an opening onto de-

scription rather than a closing down on a single view.

Abstract art, while seeming insistently to reject

and destroy representation, in fact steadily

expands its possibilities. It adds new words and

phrases to the language by colonizing the lead

slugs and blank spaces in the type tray. Seeming

nihilism becomes productive, or, to put it

another way, one tradition’s killer virus becomes

another tradition’s seed. Stressing abstract art’s

position within an evolving social system of

knowledge directly belies the old notion that

abstraction is what we call an Adamic language,

a bedrock form of expression at a timeless

point prior to the accretion of conventions. If

anything, the development of abstraction in

the last fifty years suggests something more

Alexandrian than Adamic, that is, a tradition of

invention and interpretation that has become

exceptionally refined and intricate, encom-

passing a mind-boggling range of drips, stains,

blobs, blocks, bricks, and blank canvases. The

woven web of abstraction is now so dense that,

for its adepts, it can snare and cradle vanishingly

subtle, evanescent, and slender forms of life and

meaning. . . . Abstraction is a remarkable system

of productive reductions and destructions

that expands our potential for expression and

communication.

These lectures were his testament of faith—he

ends the last one by the iteration of the words “I

believe”—but since the faith was explicitly not dog-

matic, the faith it demands from us in turn is one

of, well, asking more questions. We might ask, for

instance, if Varnedoe here comes perilously close to

asserting that the proof of the value of modern art is

that it makes more modern art—a notion that seems

to invest a lot in pure production, and reminds one

of the cartoon cat who runs across empty air through

sheer belief and pedal-power (an image of art’s power

he might have liked). In another way, we might ask

if the search for an abstract art that can rival more

obviously figural art for power and dignity leads in-

evitably to a concentration on that side of abstract art

that borrows most heavily from the familiar dignities

of architecture and theater. The number of questions

that arise is proof of the fertility of the thinking.

Which leads to one last, more personal, reflection.

Though I wish with all my heart that Varnedoe could

have lived to polish these lectures, I would not have

them other than they are. They feel free. For, in an

irony that even a writer as keenly aware of the power

of irony as he was could not have anticipated, their

necessarily unfinished nature—their existence as

lectures, still-breathing sketches toward a final work,

drafts and researches not yet fully closed—may allow

readers more room for exactly the kind of open-

ended responses, the inventive reinterpretations, the

structured but uncoerced freedom to use another’s

thought to think again for ourselves, that Kirk Varne-

doe thought was at the heart of all creative endeavors.

An irony as happy, in its way, for new-arriving readers

as it is tragic for those of us who knew him.

Adam Gopnik